How The Scots Invented The Modern World by Arthur Herman

Summary

A beautiful and well-organized retelling of Scotland’s rise in the 17th and 18th centuries and subsequent impact across the world in the 19th century – which is still felt today. A great read into the 200-300 year cycles of (global) superpowers.

Key Takeaways

• Any civilization progresses in stages
  • Hunting and gathering
  • Nomadic lifestyle
  • Agriculture
  • Commerce
  • Industrial
  • Technological / digital
  • What’s next?
• Progress requires
  • On an individual level: consistent effort until the realization of one’s imagination.
  • On a societal level: dynamism in at least one area. Once groupthink and an acceptance of the status quo occurs, the only way forward for that group/organisation/society is down.
• On a societal level: pride > autonomy, poverty, liberty.
• On an individual level: appropriation and (materialistic or financial) gain > autonomy > pride.
• Encouraging humans: incentives > coercion. Liberty > slavery.
• Changing someone’s mind:
  • Change the angle of your argument to find common ground
  • Dilute the person’s influence by going to a higher power – one way or another, you can make them comply.
• What kills a civilization: content with the status quo to the extent that hunger to improve (oneself, one’s family, others, society at large) disappears.
• Good government:
  • Expands the opportunities of its citizens (compared to what one could achieve alone)
  • Protect its citizens’ life, liberty and property
    • Maintains peace and order
  • Provides the freedom to develop and innovate
  • Counters the extreme case of overspecialization by providing proper education, avoiding groupthink and helping citizens retain their civility.
• A revolution occurs when a nation is progressing but its constitution and government cannot keep up with the changes and become out of touch with its citizens’ needs.
• People desire
  • To know his/her place in the world (or tribe)
  • Stability and harmony. This gives confidence and trust in a (prosperous) future.
  • Justice and emancipation. Being treated equally to – what they consider – their peers.
  • Having a sense of control over how they live. Humans adapt to their circumstances so what is important is not how much control they have, but their perception of having control.
• Human nature: we still don’t know what drives us. Some attempts of Scottish philosophers:
  • We pursue happiness. Happiness = being virtuous, being free, doing good to others, and having civil rights.
  • We desire to appropriate: to own things and have a sense of property and ownership.
  • We want to better our own condition and act out of self-interest as a result. The more we pursue this, the more we realize we need others and start collaborating. To make this exchange and collaboration more fruitful, we start to understand the value of (building) trust, treating others well and providing value to them.
• We are ultimately creatures of our environment. Nurture > nature.
  • Interactions with others sharpen minds, increase tolerance and teach obligations toward others. 
  • Create an environment in which you interact with people from different cultures, backgrounds, disciplines and with different values and beliefs, so you don’t become close-minded or fall into groupthink. 
• Imagination is the foundation of individual and human progress.

What I got out of it

Herman did a great job illustrating developments in different disciplines and locations which together led to various societal changes (positive and negative). Reading carefully and connecting it with the rise and fall of other societies in history, I’m starting to see the commonalities: which components increase the odds of a thriving society or community and which ones the odds of a declining one.
And, with limited resources, which components we should focus on first to make subsequent developments more likely.

It also put societal development in perspective: change seemingly happens overnight, but to get to that point takes a generation or two. It has made me further emphasize building for the extremely long-term: creating assets and providing value to the generations that come after me and offering them in an asynchronous way.

Society makes progress on knowledge acquired in the past, but accessible in the present.  Let’s ensure our current most advanced knowledge does not get lost in a sea of hype, fads and FUD.

Summary notes

Religion and Civil War

Scotland generated the basic institutions, ideas, attitudes, and habits of mind that characterize the modern age.
Fundamental to the Scottish notion of history is the idea of progress. Both societies and individuals grow and improve over time. We measure progress by how far we have come from what we were before.

John Knox succeeded in creating a New Jerusalem in Scotland – this marked the Scottish Reformation.
Knox and Buchanan believed that political power was ordained by God, but that that power was vested not in kings or in nobles or even in the clergy, but in the people. The Presbyterian covenant with God required them to defend that power against any interloper. Punishing idolatry and destroying tyranny was a sacred duty laid by God on the “whole body of the people and of every man in his vocation,” Knox wrote.

Buchanan: all political authority ultimately belonged to the people, who came together to elect someone, whether a king or a body of magistrates, to manage their affairs.

The English Civil War destroyed the facade of absolute monarchy in Britain. A new political ideal, that of government with the consent of the governed, had arrived. 

Education

Burns understood how important education can be in shaping the character of the inner self.
Scotland’s literacy rate would be higher than that of any other country by the end of the eighteenth century. Scotland became Europe’s first modern literate society.

Literacy opened up new cultural choices, and reinforced others: a specifically Scotting reading public developed, with an appetite for the new as well as the familiar and well-worn.

For middle-class Scots, education was more than just a means to professional credentials or social advancement. It became a way of life.
The Schools Act of 1696 is an example of how social actions have unintended consequences.

By 1689 the two kingdoms (England and Scotland) were ruled by a single crown, with separate capitals and parliaments. The balance had shifted: economics, rather than religion, became the new issue of contention.

England was richer, more populous, and more politically stable than Scotland, and was emerging as Europe’s new superpower.

By 1695 Scottish parliament decided to compete at the English level by modelling England and creating a new economy by legislation. After the Blasmephy Act and School Act, they established the Bank of Scotland and authorised a public chartered corporation – the Darien Company – modelled after the British East India Company…which failed miserably.

What motivated Scottish people to invest in the Darien Company was pride not a sense of good investment opportunity.

Act of Union

England wanted union because the prior Scottish royal family and its descendants were seeking support from France, England’s chief enemy.
Scottish opinion on a union was mixed, but it passed and became Great Britain.
By signing the treaty of union, Scotland’s political class was committing suicide.
It was secret money that ultimately “bought” the Scottish Parliament.

Scots were asked to exchange their political autonomy for economic growth. But by that time, London had effectively been running Scotland for more than a century, making the union less a conflict of autonomy and more so one of pride.

The General Assembly faced a trade-off: insist on getting everything they wanted and possibly lose it all or accept an Episcopalian king and the merger with England, but win concessions on the final draft, and preserve the Kirk’s control over its doctrine and discipline.

Great Britian – The Merger of England and Scotland

Instead of becoming a trap, the Act of Union launched an economic boom. In a single generation, it would transform Scotland from a Third World country into a modern society, and open up a cultural and social revolution. Scots experienced unprecedented freedom and mobility.

At first, this didn’t seem the case. A decade after the treaty, domestic industries that had relied on tariffs and restrictions for survival were now being killed off.
Taxes had also gone up. But farsighted Scots realized: the English were willing to pay more taxes as they got a better government for their money (than Scots traditionally had had).

Scotland found itself yoked to this powerful engine for change, which expanded men’s opportunities at the same time as it protected what they held dear: life, liberty, and property.

Scotland ended up with the best of both worlds: peace and order from a strong administrative state, but freedom to develop and innovate without undue interference from those who controlled it – the new Parliament largely ignored Scotland.

Over the next century, Scots learned to rely on their own resources and ingenuity and realized the advantages of a laissez-faire private sector far earlier than the English. 

Change constantly involves trade-offs, and that short-term costs are often compensated by long-term benefits.
Within 20-25 years, and 5-10 years after a failed revolt, there were signs of momentous change in the economy.

What drove Scotland’s emergence: its universities and its law courts.

Scottish Enlightenment

Man is the product of history.
Human beings, and our moral character, are constantly evolving and developing, shaped by a variety of forces over which we as individuals have little or no control. We are ultimately creatures of our environment.
These changes rest on certain fundamental principles and discernable patterns. The study of man is a scientific study.

The goal of intellectual life was to understand in order to teach others, to enable the next generation to learn what you yourself have mastered and build on it.

The freewheeling entrepreneurial character of Glasgow communicated itself to its university.

For Scottish intellectuals, the study of science, medicine, mathematics, and even engineering was at least as important as literature, philosophy, history, and the arts. The enlightened man was expected to understand both.

Anglicans and Presbyterians had learned to mix in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance. Part of this was the need to close the ranks against the Catholic Irish majority.

Refined and refinement were important words for the Scottish Englightenment.
As was politeness: it encapsulated all the strengths of a sophisticated culture – its keen sense of understanding, its flourishing art and literature, its self-confidence, its regard for truth and the importance of intellectual criticism, and, most important, an appreciation of the humane side of our character.
Kindness, compassion, self-restraint, and a sense of humour were, for Shaftesbury, the final fruits of a “polished” culture.

Shaftesbury had combined political and religious liberty with personal liberty, a polishing and refining of the self through friendly social interaction with others.

Interaction with others sharpens our minds and deepens our understanding. But it also teaches about our obligations toward others – just as the encounters between Dublin’s Anglicans and Ulster Presbyterians made each more tolerant of the other’s point of view.

We serve others not because we realize we have no choice if we wanted to get along, but because we realize we enjoy doing it.

Hutcheson: the highest form of happiness is making others happy.
Virtue is its own reward, one which combines self-interest and altruism and gives us a contented mind and soul.

Hutcheson innovated at school: he discussed assigned readings directly with students, usually the ancient authors on morality such as Aristotle and Cicero.

Unlike the French, the Scottish Enlightenment never saw Christianity as its mortal enemy.

Hutcheson: freedom’s ends are not selfish ones; they are in truth governed by God, through our moral reasoning. A free society enjoys a firm and permanent backstop to any danger: our moral sense which enables us to distinguish the vicious from the virtuous and the decent from the obscene, just as our intellectual reason enables us to sort out truth from falsehood.
“The nature of virtue is thus as immutable as the divine Wisdom and Goodness.”

The desire to be moral and virtuous, treat others with kindness and compassion; the desire to be free, including political freedom; and the desire to enjoy our natural rights to society, as civil rights, are universal desires. These lead to human “happiness”.

Scotland’s Law and Legal System

England: common law; Scotland: learnt from Roman civil law.
The Scots don’t ask what the evidence proves. They ask “what really happened?”
His guide is not precedent but reason – fairness and equity.

Apprenticing was a typical way to start one’s training in the law.
Scots, however, were a product of rigorous scholarly erudition as of practical skills.

Scots loved to organize and systematize knowledge.

The law is a means to an end – and what that end is depends on human desires and needs. But some basic principles have to stick to make it work. 
One principle: reason.
Another: nature.

Humans need a reason to work together as a community, and to surrender personal freedom to others.
Kames: the most important human instinct is our sense of property and desire to own things. Property is a part of my sense of self.

Kames: “The law of a country is in perfection when it corresponds to the manners of a people, their circumstances, their government. And as these are seldom stationary, the law ought to accompany them in their changes.”

Kames’ four-stage theory – how human community develops:

• Hunting and fishing
• Pastoral-nomadic
• Agriculture
• Commerce

The underlying cause of historical change: changes in the “means of production”.

Some societies are not free or happy because of resource scarcity: the rights of the individual have to give way to the imperatives of the group.

Material progress brings other kinds of progress in its wake.

Nurture, not nature, explained human behaviour and institutions.

How to deal with a dominant culture that one admired but that threatened to overwhelm one’s own heritage, and oneself with it?

The bonds that held the Highland clans together were land and landholding. The chiefs got land and peasants; the clansman got land to work or graze in order to feed his family and pay his rent.
The alliance between the Crown and the clan chieftains was one of mutual self-interest.
The chieftain’s only concern was honour – not guilt or innocence.
Poverty was the keynote to everything and compensated by only one thing: his pride as a warrior.

To make the Highland clans more civilized:

• Take away their weapons
• Build roads

What made enlightened and law-abiding individuals conspire to overthrow the existing government:

• A nostalgic yearning for a traditional social order in which everyone supposedly knew his or her place and stayed in it.
• A community that was stable and harmonious – not competitive like capitalism.
• “Justice”: inferiors willingly obeying superiors.

Conflicting self-interest caused Charles’ 1745 revolt to fail.

“Unnecessary severity creates pity.”

Once a group is defeated, the other experiences a boom. Post-1745 Scotland witnessed an explosion of cultural and economic activity.

Tobacco Lords. Business, rather than birth, had conferred on them an almost aristocratic status.
How did they do it:

• Myth – Geography: faster travel time, meaning lower costs and quicker return-on-investment.
• Myth – Reliance on a loyal circle of family to pool capital and lay off risk.
• Truth – Their balance sheets: their ability to summon up capital from a variety of sources, while ruthlessly cutting costs. The vast majority of profits were ploughed back into the business.
• Education and business sense were crucial.

Strong and quick progress in society was because people from all walks of life were engaged in the same project: creating a polite, humane, enlightened culture. An intermingling of the practical and the intellectual.

Once started, economic growth is hard to shut down and becomes an engine of change in other ways too.

Edinburgh’s New Town is a model of successful urban planning. Perhaps the ideal of middle-class residential suburbs and “planned communities”.
Two groups were left out:

• Aristocrats: not enough space for their mansions.
• Labouring masses and working poor.

James’ architecture philosophy: form must follow function.

Progress is possible in the arts and in society by drawing on the best of the past and combining and recombining it with the elements at hand.
Scottish moral focus: becoming “modern ancients”, combining Stoic moral seriousness with a sense of individual freedom and comfort.

How Scotland’s Education and Universities Conquered The World

Aberdeen played a role too, but Glasgow and Edinburgh were the “twin cities” of enlightenment and change. They complemented each other.
Glasgow was more innovative and practical: it knew how things were made and how to get things done.
Edinburgh was more artistic and literary, more intellectual in the abstract sense.
What made Edinburgh different was its close-knit community of scholars and thinkers, who were willing to take up new ideas while putting old ones to the test of discussion and criticism. Edinburgh was a “hotbed of genius”. It sharpened minds, inspired originality, and intensified that sense of purposeful activity that every thinker, writer, or artist needs to be truly productive and creative.

Only London and Paris could compete with Edinburgh as an intellectual centre.
It was a place where all ideas were created equal, where brains rather than social rank took pride of place, and where serious issues could be debated with.

The most important of these clubs was the Select Society.
They believed that a free and open sophisticated culture was compatible with, even predicated on, a solid moral and religious foundation.

Through the complex connections of commercial society “the mind acquires new vigour and enlarges its powers and faculties” and “industry, knowledge, and humanity are linked together by an indissoluble chain.” It makes men free, and enlarges their power to do good. Virtue and enlightenment move together step by step.

Adam Smith

Human ingenuity will find a way to defy government rules and regulations when they fly in the face of self-interest.
“The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition…is so powerful a principle, that it is alone, and without any assistance, not only capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity but of surmounting a hundred impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often encumbers its operations.”

If Adam Smith is the first great modern economist, then David Hume is modernity’s first great philosopher.

For more than two thousand years Western philosophers had praised the primacy of reason as the guide to all human action and virtue. The job of reason was to master our emotions and appetites. Hume reversed this: “Reason is and ought to be, the slave of the passions.”
Reason’s role is instrumental: it teaches us how to get what we want. What we want is determined by our emotions, our passions and our desire to live according to rational principles. It is not reason that teaches us this but habit, a frame of mind that associates certain effects with certain causes or actions.
For Hume, self-interest is all there is.

We can have what we want, when we want it, society tells us, just as long as we do not take it at the expense of the rights of others.
The virtues of the ancient Stoics – discipline, self-restraint, moral rectitude, and righteous anger at wrongdoers – were just as necessary as civility and compassion to life in society, as these police our dealings with others.
Smith – “fellow feeling”: a natural sense of identification with other human beings. We use it to judge others’ actions toward us and our own actions toward them.

When examining your own conduct, Smith recommends observing your actions from the others’ point of view and from your own point of view.

The mission of good government: restrain those who hurt or disturb the happiness of others.

Imagination is the driving force of capitalism. It focuses and directs our energies toward a single purpose.
The rich man is the man with the most fertile imagination. In other words, his eyes are bigger than his stomach.

Smith: The division of labour occurs at every stage and in every human activity.

Capitalism and division of labour produce people who do nothing but think about improvement, and it lays the foundation for technological innovation and cultural refinement.

Smith: Capitalism generates a great inequality of wealth, but a rising tide raises all boats, and even the poor get lifted up. When such a great quantity of everything is produced with division of labour, even the slothful and oppressed have improved lives.
Comparative advantage: better to be a poor man in a rich country than a rich man in a poor one.

Two universal conditions for the making of civil society:

• Division of labour
• Self-interest – a passion or emotional impulse, rather than a cold rational calculation.

Smith: Not everyone is solely driven by self-interest in a material sense, but enough of us are to make a difference for society.
The pursuit of our own self-interest causes us to reach out to others.

The interdependence of the market begets independence of the mind, meaning the freedom to see one’s own self-interest and the opportunity to pursue it.

People in government themselves are creatures of passions and whims, just like we all are, making government a poorer allocator of wealth than the free market (i.e. all the individuals that make up society).

Smith: There is a role for a strong government:

• National defence, to protect society and its commerce with its neighbours.
• Provide justice and protection of individual rights, particularly the right of property.
• Defray the expenses of essential public works, such as roads, bridges, canals, and harbours.
• Creating an education that counteracts deformity of the human character – that one doesn’t become close-minded due to specialization – by the division of labour. Retain a civilized culture among the masses.
  • Something that teaches them courage, martial spirit, self-sacrifice, discipline and loyalty, and trains people physically.

Any other form of government has all kinds of unintended consequences.
Free market is not an intellectual dogma but a basic lesson of history.

Smith: “Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.”

The free market was as much a check upon the greed and power of the merchant as it was on an interfering king or government bureaucrat.

Through capitalism we gain, but we also lose: the cultural cost of capitalism.
Honour, integrity and courage gets destroyed by a commercial society with its overspecialisation and mental mutilation.

A modern capitalist society without a decent system of education commits suicide, politically as well as culturally.

There are shortcomings to a society organized around the gratification of self-interest and the calculation of profit and loss, but the benefits are worth the price, according to Smith and Hume.

The Journey to America

The new and refined Scotland in the urban capitals drove the older and more traditional Scots to move to America.
The habits of colonizing Ireland and seizing arable land from Catholic enemies of the Ulster Scots carried over to the New World. Their insatiable desire for land, and the willingness to fight and die to keep it, laid the foundation of the frontier mentality of the American West.

One reason their cultural impact was so widespread was that they were constantly moving.

The Scotch-Irish South was a breeding ground for a type of strong, independent man and woman, a school for natural leaders.
Mentality: “Give me liberty or give me death.”
Living as you pleased was a matter of birthright.
Duelling and the code of honour that went with it, became embedded in Southern culture.

Ulster Scots dipped deep into the emotional resources of Scottish Calvinism. They worshipped in “prayer societies” and large “field meetings”. They turned to their ministers for inspiration and support, and took comfort in a hellfire-and-damnation style of Christianity.

Scottish Evangelicals were losing control in Scotland, saw the spirit of the Lord blossoming in the colonies and were drawn to move to America.

Scotland’s Influence on American Education

Witherspoon: Education is not a form of indoctrination, or of reinforcing orthodoxy, but a broadening and deepening of the mind and spirit. The idea of freedom is fundamental to that process.
“Govern, govern, govern but beware of governing too much. Convince your pupils…that you wish to see them happy, and desire to impose no restraints but such as their real advantage, and the order and welfare of the college, render indispensable.”

Witherspoon: Even if you disagree with a philosopher or thinker, you still need to read him in order to appreciate his arguments and refute them.
He charted his students’ intellectual progress in other ways:

• Reorganize student clubs as places for intellectual discussion as well as conviviality.
• Organize debates and speeches almost every evening so that students “may learn, by early habit, presence of mind and proper pronunciation and gesture in public speaking.”
• University is a place to not just teach students but train future public leaders.
• Be as ‘inclusive’ as possible.
• Students think of themselves as Americans, and think of themselves as obligated to lead America to a new future.

American unity required more than just rational planning; it needed a strong moral base…which was being built at university.

The American Revolution was driven by secular political ideas as well as religious differences. These issues were inseparable.
Scots back home were against the revolution. As they lost, they had to pay for this by being forced to leave.

Side-effect of the American Revolution: it infused the British dominions in Canada with a dose of Scotsmen who played an important part in the making of that country in the 1800s.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident” and “the pursuit of happiness” in the draft of the declaration came from the Scottish school.

Britain would be torn apart if it failed to change its imperial policies more toward free trade: which it failed to with the US, but succeeded with Canada and Australia…hence the stronger ties in the present.
A large continental republic was doomed:

• Geographic distance
• Conflicting interests from differences in social development lead to civil conflict

The only solution would be tyranny, which Rome resorted to and had led to its downfall.

Heart of the new American system: countervailing interests aka gridlock.

• Federal versus state power
• Executive versus legislative and both versus judicial
• Disparate economic interests of bankers versus farmers; southerners versus northerners
• Indirect elections at the senatorial and presidential levels to frustrate the will of the people

Result: not chaos but stability, and above all liberty.
Gridlock at the public level guarantees liberty at the private level.

Reid: all human beings come equipped with innate rational capacity called “common sense.” This allows them to make clear and certain judgments about the world, and their dealings with it.

Knowledge is power and the route to knowledge is through experience.
This power belongs to every man, regardless of attributes.
Human progress rests on expanding that capacity to its utmost and to as many people as possible so that we can all become truly, morally free.
An ordinary man can be as certain of his judgments as the philosopher.

American – and Scottish – culture: an independent intellect combined with assertive self-respect, and grounded by a strong sense of moral purpose.

The Supreme Court:

• Embodied a basic principle that everyone could agree on – that self-government could only function under the rule of law – with an independent judiciary interpreting its key provisions.
• The possibility that such a court could, under the banner of “judicial review,” overturn duly approved legislative acts raised the hackles of those who saw Congress as enactors of “the will of the people,” an equally important principle.

The purpose of a Supreme Court was not to “disparage the legislative authority” or to “confer upon the judicial department a power superior” but a power to the federal government that it would desperately need – the power of reflection – in order to decide whether a particular law fit within the frame of the Constitution.
It’s the “jury of the country” and would be one of the most democratic institutions.

The better ordinary people understood the law, the better for the law, and the better for democracy.

Scottish culture: inquisitive, penetrating, unsentimental; impatient with pious dogmas or cant; relentlessly thorough, sometimes to the point of pedantry; rational, but buoyed by a tough-minded sense of humour and a grasp of the practical.

Steward: rather than “common sense”, it’s “good sense”. Our judgments reflect “that prudence and discretion which are the foundation of successful conduct.” While the foundations of truth were still equally available to all human beings, it was also clear that, in that respect, some are more equal than others. A trained person in a certain field will have more insight and be better able to predict the consequences of certain actions in that field than the average person.

Commercial society was not just more civilized or more productive or more rational than its predecessors; it was qualitatively different from every society that had preceded it. It broke the mold of the four-stage theory of civilization.

Burke: economic change doesn’t drive progress of civilization. It’s the opposite: the elaborate network of civilized ‘manners,’ meaning morality, law, and tradition grown up over generations, made a system of commercial exchange based on trust possible, and hence human progress possible.

The Power and Role of Media

Edinburgh Review: its goal was not simply to entertain, or even to educate; it sought to keep readers up to date on the latest state of progress in every important field of human endeavour and addressed its readers as partners in a single great undertaking, the progress of modern society.
Lesson: information is made more memorable when it is tinged with bias.
Despite the clear political bias, literary quality and intellectual integrity came first.

Advanced knowledge became democratized and available to all.
The paper took off because there was nothing like it; it was the first of its kind (and no competition).
One mission: to create an “enlightened public opinion.”

Politics

Brougham set out to broaden their base and elevate their sense of purpose, first by reaching out to leading radical elements, then by orchestrating a steady public-relations campaign, to make his own progressive views appear as the official Whig view, and vice versa.

The big agricultural counties, and their landlords, dominated Parliament and remained fixed in a feudal, premercantile mindset.

Speeches gave the Reform Bill a historical grounding, and therefore legitimacy, that even its most fervent supporters had never imagined was there.
Lesson: change angle/perspective to find common ground and remove point of contention.

Macaulay: “The great cause of revolutions is this, that while nations move onwards, constitutions stand still.”

Political brinksmanship: if the opposition rejects your proposal, don’t alter the (already publicly accepted) proposal, but (threaten to) dilute the opposition’s influence by working with a higher power. Create a situation where the proposal will pass regardless.

The British constitution had a new, self-conscious principle: change as reform, rather than revolution.

How Literature and Writing Change Societies and Shape Cultures

People believe what they want to believe – even if it’s false.

Romanticism: primitive cultures are nobler, purer, and more creative than their more ‘advanced’ counterparts – contrast with Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations (logos and human nature are unchanging).

Scott created a magical realm of the imagination for readers by combining the Romantic school’s taste for drama, strong emotions and breathtaking scenery, and the Scottish school’s hardheaded sense of historical truth.

Through Scott’s literary work he single-handedly created a new industry: Highland tourism.
The shift in cultural mood was all due to Sir Walter Scott.
Lesson: media creates awareness which leads to economic benefits. Also, it creates culture and can create a national identity, sense of pride and desire to associate with this cultural tribe.

Division of labour: when people start thinking in terms of profit and “improvement”, rather than rewarding generations of loyalty and service, the old way of life is doomed.
Pressures and relationships/bonds change from social to economic.

Law of the strong / hierarchy: When it profits people higher up in the chain to change their ways, they will. People lower in the chain will get dragged along even if they end up paying for the price of progress. Example: Highland chiefs and tenants.

When a change is rooted in economic reality, and social forces, beyond one’s control, nothing can stop it. Relate to: Asimov’s Foundation.

Another way to inspire a broad audience to appreciate Scottish history: through prose fiction.
Created a whole new literary genre: the historical novel.
Lesson: see previous. Create a new media or genre within media to increase virality and economic potential. People desire novelty. Relate to: The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing

The historical novel became a distinct art form, a way of making the past come alive through an intriguing blend of imaginative fantasy and meticulous fidelity to historical truth – a form that has proved more successful with modern readers than history itself.
Introduced a key ingredient of the modern consciousness: a sense of historical detachment.

Opposing tensions cannot be resolved without destroying the whole. Relate to: Tao Te Ching.

Sir Walter Scott had done something remarkable. He had managed to generate another Scotland parallel to the one about to be thrust into the new century. A Scotland of the imagination, a place where honour, courage, and integrity could still survive, and even thrive, within the individual. Scott had created a new nationality identity, based on the myth of the strong and noble Highlander.

Adam Smith: Imagination is the basis of modern society.

Science and Industry

What Watt did was typically Scottish: he perfected something created by someone else, and gave it a higher and wider application than its original inventor had imagined. He had created the work engine of the Industrial Revolution. Commercial society was about to turn into industrial society, with technology as its driving force.

Basic principles of the Scottish Englightenment: common sense, experience as our best source of knowledge, and arriving at scientific laws by testing general hypotheses through individual experiment and trial and error. Science and technology gave civilization its dynamic movement.

A new concept had entered the modern consciousness: the idea of power not in a political sense, the ability to command people, but the ability to command nature – the power to alter and use it to create something new, and produce it in greater and larger quantities than ever before.

Watt’s invention revealed that the future of the division of labour was technological change.

Triangular base of the Scottish practical mind: science, medicine and mathematics.

Overcoming scurvy with citrus fruits (oranges and lemons) – a crucial contribution to Britain’s recovery as a world power, and its acquisition of empire. Perhaps the medical world’s first control experiment in history. Page 309.

Scots became experts in another technical aspect of modernization: transport and communication. More than anyone else, they understood how essential the free flow of goods, services, people, and information was to the creation of modern society.

Adam Smith realized early on that England had developed faster as a commercial society, and then as an Industrial power, in part because it enjoyed a network of roads, canals, bridges, riverways, and harbours that permitted goods in one part of the country to reach the other parts with relative ease.

One development: John McAdam, who devised a cheap and efficient way to build a sturdy roadbed by using crushed stones and gravel. This he did with typical Scottish thoroughness, first travelling nearly thirty thousand miles across Britain and examining nearly every major road and highway.
This method worked best for repairing old roads and highways.

The man who really opened up Scotland, and in doing so transformed the nature of modern communication, was Thomas Telford.
The problem to get raw materials out of Wales was solved with canals since water was the cheapest form of transport of bulk goods across England.

Telford: “I hold that the aim and end of all ought not to be a mere bag of money, but something far higher and better.” – Have a purpose and aim higher.

The Caledonian Canal served as the model for the Suez Canal. Its construction is one of the great epics of modern engineering history. It took almost fifteen years to build, using tens of thousands of workers, at an unheard-of cost of nearly a billion pounds (two trillion dollars in today’s money). Almost all of the money came from the British government. It opened up the central Highlands to commercial traffic.

Canals, roads, bridges, and renovated harbours were all crucial to the network of self-interested exchange that held together modern commercial society.
The next logical step was to improve the means of transport on those thoroughfares, with the help of Watt’s steam engine.

Steam power allowed a factory or mill owner to build his place of business where it suited him, rather than having to rely on geographical accident, such as a swift-running river or access to cheap fuel such as coal, to dictate his choice of location. Where it suited him usually meant close to routes where he could transport his products and supplies cheaply, and where he could find a cheap and ready supply of labour – which in turn usually meant a city. In other words, Watt made industrial production an essentially urban activity.

All this growth soared far beyond the city’s capacity to offer safe and affordable housing, or even adequate sewage and sanitation.
Scottish doctors took the lead as champions of municipal public health and hygiene.
Scottish public health efforts differed from European ones in two ways:

• They looked more to the private sector to supply the necessary support and capital, and were unwilling to involve the state if private resources were available.
• They laid heavy stress on the need for education and moral uplift, as well as cleanliness and sanitation.

Clydeside’s Irish were the precursors of the armies of unskilled but hardworking “guest workers” of modern industrial Europe.

Unions simply wanted a decent living, with a higher wage but also a sense of individual dignity and independence. In other words, like Scots everywhere, they wanted to be a part of the progress, not head it off at the pass.

“Man is designed by nature to appropriate” has been more durable than “man should be made to share.”

Ultimately, working-class Scots were allowed to vote.

Smiles’ Self-Help presented Scottish virtues as a ‘personal power’: an individual can remake his life and environment through hard work, perseverance, moral discipline, ceaseless optimism, and the energy to seize opportunities when they present themselves.

Smiles: “National progress is the sum of individual industry, energy, and uprightness, as national decay is of individual idleness, selfishness, and vice.”

Geopolitics – How Scots Changed the World

Pasley created modern geopolitics.
In the modern world, true national security rested on policy and power – especially military power – according to Pasley.

A series of technological changes made the British soldier a much deadlier opponent.
A new kind of infantry warfare was born with it, in which the individual soldier could kill at twice the range almost with impunity, and massed fire meant certain death to anyone caught in it.
A technological gap was opening up between Europeans and the rest of the world, which would threaten even wealthy and advanced non-Western cultures such as those of China, Persia, and India.

The Empire’s ‘most desirable death’: “the improvement of the natives reaching such a pitch as would render it impossible for a foreign government to retain power.”

Recipe to improve a country – the Scottish way: better schools, better roads, more just laws, more prosperous towns and cities, more money in ordinary people’s pockets and more food on their tables.

The last generation of the Scottish Englightenment became convinced that the only politics a modern society requires is a strong effective government.
But this confidence also blinded liberals to the emotional force and appeal of nationalism.

India’s role within the Empire had changed also. It was now crucial to British policy because of one crop: opium. Opium was the single commodity the British could trade in bulk to the other great empire to the east, China. There was only one problem: opium was illegal in China.
China had looked a model of civil commercial society in the past, but was now dying: corrupt, decadent, and barbaric. Scots, the Jardine-Matheson cartel, went in for the kill by smuggling opium.
The technological gap between West and non-West – a steam-powered iron gunboat called the Nemesis – made it work.

Canada

Canada’s main value to Europeans was its fur trade. The best traders and trappers came from Scotland’s northern islands the Orkneys. These settlers had advantages over their English counterparts due to Canada’s frigid climate, the deep isolation of months in icebound inlets and rivers, and the ceaseless work in cold and wet being similar to home.

By stopping the rum trade and resorting to legitimate exchange (to get his beaver pelts), Canada avoided violent confrontations with native people (which America failed to) and it witnessed one hundred years of unbroken peace and order. 

The greatest transformation of Canada came when John MacDonald launched the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, connecting the country from Atlantic to Pacific. It was one of the largest public-private joint ventures in history.
It defied obstacles and challenges as forbidding as anything the Americans faced with their transcontinental railroad. Fleming and his surveyors, engineers, and road crews had to lay track along nine hundred miles of bottomless muskey, across the empty prairies of Manitoba and Alberta, and into the steep foothills of the Canadian Rockies.

If London did not consider granting Canadians some form of self-government, they might throw in their lot with the Americans. If London gave them independence, however, Elgin believed, Canadians might actually want to strengthen their ties to Britain. He proved right.

Travel was beginning to demand a level of chronological precision the world’s clocks could no longer afford. So Sandford Fleming solved the problem. He took out a map of the world and divided it into twenty-four different time zones, each measuring fifteen degrees of longitude. The Americans had adopted a similar scheme for organizing their railroad timetables: now Fleming gave it a wider application than anyone had imagined.

Australia

At the turn of the eighteenth century Australia was a hard, vicious, ugly place. Two Scots came to change that, in two contrasting ways: one by altering Australia’s economy, the other by reforming its way of life.

The key to keeping order in Australia:

• Banning trade in rum and Sydney’s bars being closed during religious services on Sunday.
• Mandatory church attendance for all convicts
• Set up Sunday schools for local children
• Treat convicts as men and women, rather than as beasts of burden.

‘Emancipation’ was “the greatest inducement that can be held out to the Reformation of Manners of the Inhabitants.” Macquarie met every arriving convict ship personally and reminded the prisoners that while they had an obligation to obey their warders and employers, they also had rights.

It was proof, he told his superiors, of what could be accomplished by using incentives instead of coercion, through the work of free men rather than slave labour – the same point Adam Smith had made in the Wealth of Nations nearly forty years ealier.

Africa

It was called the “Dark Continent” because it was shrouded in mystery. No one knew what its vast interior held, or what people or riches might be found there. All trade and contact was through African middlemen. The mosquito-infested coast and disease-ridden swamps and jungles barred any European from probing farther.

Steam power was the key to unlocking the dark secrets of African, and expanding the British Empire. The voyage of the Nemesis to China six years later was the result.
What finally opened up Africa was not the desire for empire or profits but religion.

“Free Kirk”: The new evangelism sought to provide a steadily improving inner spiritual life, to match the progress of society and “civilization.”
The thirst for knowledge of the world and the desire to be one with Jesus Christ were not at odds with each other.

Like citrus against scurvy, quinine opened a pathway for long-distance travel in the tropics, in this case overland – and in doing so it would save the lives of hundreds of thousands, both black and white.

Livingstone: “Great exercise imparts elasticity to the muscles, fresh and healthy blood circulates through the brain, the mind works well, the eye is clear, the step is firm.”

Livingstone decided that rivers such as the Zambezi were the key to opening Africa up to the rest of the world. He believed they constituted a great “water highway” that could bring goods, services, and the Gospel to even the most remote parts, and trigger the continent’s economic and social advance – much as Telford’s roads and canals had opened up the Highlands.

What got Livingstone respect respect of local tribesmen and their leaders – and a steady stream of conversions to Christianity – was his sharp analysis and technical knowledge of Scottish medicine.

The whole weight of Scottish Enlightenment tradition was on the side of belief in a universal human nature, which all human beings shared, but which was shaped according to environment and a society’s developmental stage – “nurture,” in other words, rather than “nature.”

Livingstone: “Every nation on earth worthy of freedom is ready to shed its blood in its defence…Rebellion was prima facie evidence of bad government to begin with.”

The second great barrier to Africa’s development: slave trade. While Britain had abolished it in 1807 and freed its slaves in 1833, Arab traders continued the business.

The final remedy had to be the spread of legitimate trade and commerce with European nations across Africa. When local chiefs realized they could make more money selling palm oil or ivory, instead of their own people, Africa’s ways would change. And rivers for commerce and communication were the key to making it happen.

United States

The development of Canada was largely a public enterprise, controlled and in many cases financed from the top down. 
Contrast with USA:

• Canada’s political view: government as a resource for society’s progress, rather than a hindrance to it. Provinces have some power; most lies with the government.
• US’ political view: individual self-interest governed by common sense and a limited need for government. Government has some power according to the constitution; rest lies with states.

Canada attracted Scotsmen who wanted to own a farm and lead a rural life, US attracted those who were determined to succeed in a trade or in a factory job. Their work ethic and moral discipline were bywords.

Only the Jews had more or comparable skills, but unlike them, Scots were not held back by religious discrimination.
Nor were they intimidated by their new environment. On the contrary, it had a certain familiar feel.
It is not surprising that so many Scots came to identify with America. They saw it as a fulfilment of their own hopes and desires, and Scottish men and women as indispensable to its forward progress.

Benjamin Rush: “Knowledge is of little use, when confined to mere speculation.”

Rush had made science an integral part of the college curriculum, along with history, English, and moral philosophy.

Dugald Stewart had always stressed the importance of moral philosophy as the matrix discipline, the place where all the other disciplines, arts and science alike, met. His lectures on philosophy and ethics became the standard guides.

How to create a stimulating intellectual atmosphere in the classroom and lecture hall:

• Writing across the curriculum, with compositions, essays and research papers assigned in every class and at every level. This taught students how to think for themselves and how to write clear, incisive, original English prose.
• A person of strong moral sense and independent judgment, with a knowledge of history, philosophy, literature, and science at his fingertips, in whom “all the faculties of the mind are exerted, and powers unused before, are awakened into life and activity.”

The Scottish school was the friend of science and moral confidence, and the enemy of moral relativism, pessimism and doubt. Its philosophy stressed observation and experience as the primary source of knowledge. it saw human consciousness as ouw window on reality, and onto the self. And it stressed that as human beings, we come equipped to grasp the truth about ourselves and about the world around us, including a sense of right and wrong.

The German university ideal, on the other hand, stressed rigorous research and professional specialization rather than the generalist approach of the Scots.

The department store was a French invention, but Scots, both in Britain and the United States, made it profitable on a new scale.

In 1834 Morse devised a system for transmitting messages electrically by wire using a series of dots and dashes to represent each letter. The Morse telegraph, and Morse code, made a system of long-distance communication possible; a message could travel, without danger of being lost or destroyed, over thousands of miles in a matter of hours rather than months.

The rise of industrial corporations, such as Bell Telephone and AT&T, signalled a radical change in the way capitalism organized itself. Big business was replacing the merchant-entrepreneur as the driving wheel of commerce: technology had spawned mass production, which in turn gave birth to a new system for meeting the demands of consumers and suppliers.

Carnegie got:

• “Death to privilege” egalitarian politics from one grandfather
• A sense of optimism, intellectual energy and a belief in education as the foundation of democracy from the other.

The Scottish thoroughness and attention to cutting business costs, and willingness to take risks, paid off.

Carnegie changed the nature of division of labour, which Adam Smith and his disciples had understood to be the source of all productive wealth. He did this by standing the relationship between business and technology on its head. Before Carnegie, businesses had to wait for technological advances by scientists such as Charles Macintosh (the inventor of vulcanized rubber) and engineers such as James Watt to create new products or increase production. Now the demands of production themselves would force technological change. The manager, not the engineer or the foreman or the quick-witted employee, decided by looking at his flow charts where processes could be made more efficient or pennies could be saved. The engineer and the employee followed the manager’s lead.
Lesson: Change the order in processes to remove constraints/bottlenecks. Question and test common-held beliefs; can the opposite produce superior results? What’s the worst that can happen?

Carnegie had discovered “economies of scale”.

Carnegie in Triumphant Democracy: “The Republic may not give wealth or happiness, she has not promised these. It is the freedom to pursue these, not their realization, we can claim. But if she does not make the emigrant happy or prosperous, this she can do and does do for everyone, she makes him a citizen.”

Herbert Spencer expanded Adam Smith’s belief in the virtue of free markets into an entire social philosophy.

The Rise and Fall of the Scots

Scotland’s upper and middle classes were losing that hard-driving entrepreneurial edge that had been a part of their cultural heritage. They increasingly settled into the ideal of the English gentleman. The values of Eton, Cambridge, and Oxford, of the Reform and Athenaeum clubs, and of Lord’s Cricket Grounds steadily replaced those of a grittier homegrown variety.

The Scottish character did continue to be recognized and admired: its moral discipline, its integrity and honesty, its capacity for hard work and ambition for advancement.
The Scottish Enlightenment had always dubbed man a “social animal,” meaning that interaction with others was indispensable for his or her intellectual and moral development.
But when carried to extremes, such a view bred in the middle-class Scot of the late Victorian and Edwardian era an acute need to conform to social norms. The emphasis on conformity blocked innovation and creativity in ways that could be stifling, even dangerous.

They were vivid examples of what Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson had warned might happen in an overspecialized modern society, where “the minds of men are contracted and rendered incapable of elevation” – but now at the top of society rather than the bottom.

James Bond is the embodiment of the Scottish commonsense mind: sure of his judgments, confident of his skills, certain that even if he makes a mistake, he did the best that he could with the available information. Above all, Bond always knows what he wants. His goals are never fuzzy or ambiguous.

Declaration of Arbroath: “It is not for glory, riches or honours that we fight: it is for liberty alone, the liberty which no good man relinquishes but with his life.”

The great insight of the Scottish Enlightenment was to insist that human beings need to free themselves from myths and see the world as it really is. This kind of intellectual liberation, they said, is required for living a free and active life.

True liberty requires a sense of personal obligation as well as individual rights. They showed how modern life can be spiritually as well as materially fulfilling. They showed how respect for science and technology can combine with a love for the arts; how private affluence can enhance a sense of civic responsibility; how political and economic democracy can flourish side by side; and how confidence in the future depends on a reverence for the past. The Scottish mind grasped how, in Hume’s words, “liberty is the perfection of civil society,” but “authority must be acknowledged essential to its very existence”; and how a strong faith in progress also requires a keen appreciation of its limitations.

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